This is getting a fair amount of discussion in the wake of the iTunes/EMI no more DRM deal. Steve (that’s Mr Jobs to you) seems to be on record as saying something to the effect that video is a completely different beast to music. The argument seems to run that while music isn’t sold in proper shops without any form of copy protection, movies - by which they mean DVDs - always have been. Okay as far as it goes, but inaccurate, especially for anyone with a long memory. Before DVDs there were these things called videos, and as far as I can remember they had no copy protection at all. In fact, I’d guess that preventing someone from copying them, given a simple double deck recorder, is pretty much impossible.
This was the world into which DVDs were released just over ten years ago, and from the start they had built-in copy protection. (I think we can make an educated guess and say that, had the music industry seen the introduction of a new technology at about that time, they would have made sure that it was as tightly locked down as well.) So it’s probably fair to say that copy protection within the movie industry is now firmly entrenched. After over a decade of selling copy protected movies without provoking a consumer backlash, what motivation does the industry have to change now?
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